1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to expert systems and reporting systems, and more specifically to a system and method for generating reports from a computer database.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Storing large amounts of transaction-level data for later analysis (data warehousing) is becoming recognized as an enabler for businesses that are seeking a competitive advantage. Tightening competitive environments and global economic trends are forcing businesses and entire industries to search for a means to gain an advantage. This advantage can be realized through the use of strategic data relating to their business--allowing better and more timely decisions, leading to a better understanding of their business and support for their customers, that ultimately leads to growth. To make use of data warehouses, the data must be retrieved, organized and then presented in an understandable format.
Discovery tools are used to retrieve, analyze and present data from data warehouses. These tools can range from very complex modeling tools to relatively simple end user query tools designed to do no more than mask the complexity of the SQL database programming language from the user. Automated tools that search the data for trends or relationships are also considered discovery tools.
The marketplace is comprised of various tool vendors whose products provide solutions for a portion of the entire knowledge discovery process. Therefore, to effectively utilize their data, the user community is forced to pick multiple, disjointed tools. In addition, these tools are targeted toward the expert user who has an in-depth knowledge of the data and database formats or the various analytic methods that are implemented in the tool. Existing products also do not let the business user explicitly and iteratively represent business knowledge. Finally, the output of existing tools consists of tables of numbers that users have to analyze and interpret.
Data warehouses, and databases in general, typically have complex structure organized for efficiency of data retrieval, not ease-of-use by the end user. Users, especially business users, desire reports in their vocabulary, not the vocabulary of the database. While some tools in the marketplace allow a user to define new terms and map those terms to the database, the management of related sets of new terms is not supported. That is, the relationship of a new term to existing terms is not automatically detected for the user.
In addition to these difficulties, it is common for the contents of a report to cause a user to desire another, similar report. Saving and re-using sets of related reports (re-generating the reports over a new set of data) is also desired. The generation of related reports and the re-generation of reports over new data is a capability not adequately available in the marketplace.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system and method for generating reports from a computer database which allow a user to retrieve and analyze data with one tool without requiring the user to have knowledge of underlying data structures or of the SQL database programming language, which allow a user to define new terms and detect and manage relationships between terms, which allow a user to easily generate related reports, and which allow a user to re-run sets of related reports over new data. It would also be desirable to provide a system and method for allowing the a user to segment and partition a database based upon attributes associated with the data in the database.